I work part-time at a thrift store, and we have volunteers who come in and work for a few hours. One of the volunteers comes up to the counter where I’m working to purchase something that is $10. I ring it up and give her the total, which is $10.74. She gives me a twenty.

When I go to get her change, I notice there are no fives.

Me: “I’m all out of fives, so I’m going to give you a twenty, and if you could, run next door and get four fives?”

There’s a bar right next to the thrift store, so I want her to go and ask for a change from $20 and have her bring the four fives back so I can give her the correct amount of change. The reason I don’t do it myself is that I am the only person there who knows how to work the till, and my boss doesn’t like it when I leave the till unattended.

Volunteer: “Wait, what did you just give me?”

Me: “I gave you a twenty because I’m out of fives, so if you could, go next door and get four fives.”

Instead, she stuck the twenties in her wallet and left. I never got my four fives, so the till was off by $20 when I counted it. My simple instructions went in one ear and straight out the other.

Some years ago, my whole department went out to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Everyone but my manager and I got the usual meh “fortunes” from the fortune cookies that weren’t even really fortunes. “You are talented in many ways.” Ones like that.

Manager’s Fortune: “The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.”

Ominous!

My Fortune: “You have gained the admiration of your pears.”

I asked them about that when I got home, but I guess they were embarrassed because they just sat there in the bowl.

I’m attending a bridal shower with a bunch of women from church. We’re playing a trivia game to see how much we know about the couple. As we finish and find out who got first place, etc, there’s a tie. The hostess says we might need a tiebreaker question.

Woman #1: “No, no, I concede.”

Woman #2: “Did you just say you cheated?”

Woman #3: “No, she said she’s conceited!”

It made us all chuckle. There were three winners who went home with flower arrangements of varying sizes. I’m not sure why they couldn’t have given the two first-place people the choice between the first- and second-place prizes, but whatever. One of them frequently helps host, so I assume that was part of the reason she let one of the other women have it.

At the company I work for, we move a lot of material out the doors. In doing so, we require the use of our trucks and third-party companies to help move material to areas our trucks don’t go.

We have customers that utilize big logistic companies to help them route material from our facility to theirs or other big-name transportation companies.

Today at work was no different than any other day. I contacted [Logistic Company] on behalf of our customer’s request, and they lined up a truck company to handle the moving of material for the customer.

The truck showed up a few hours later and our lead forklift driver took care of loading the truck outside since it was faster to load that way instead of using the overhead crane. It took fifteen minutes to load instead of maybe thirty minutes with the crane, so that was her decision so she could save time.

The truck was loaded and the driver came into the office to sign and take a copy of the BOL (bill of lading). He left and he was on his way to make the delivery. About thirty minutes after the driver had left, the lead forklift driver came into the shipping office to tell our supervisor and me what had transpired. She would have come in sooner, but she got caught up helping a new hire she’d been working on training in for shipping/receiving and got sidetracked.

Forklift Driver: “That driver I loaded up outside — I felt really creeped out by him and grossed out.”

Me: “Why’s that?”

Forklift Driver: “He was videotaping me as I was loading the material on his trailer, and while he was doing that, he was making comments like, ‘Look at this fine lady loading my trailer. She knows how to handle a big machine!’ I was so grossed and creeped out by him that I just quick-loaded the last couple of items and got away from him as fast as I could.”

Me: “That’s not okay. There’s no reason that you or any other employee here should be treated like that at work. I wish you would have told us sooner while the driver was still here so we could have refused his services.”

Forklift Driver: “I know, but I got caught up helping the new guy and just got sidetracked for a bit. It’s not the first time something like this has happened here. I’ve had drivers ask for my number or if I wanted to go out with them, but this was the first time I felt creeped out because of him taping me and the comments he was making.”

Me: “I’ll reach out to [Logistic Company] about the issue and let them know what transpired and that we will no longer allow that transportation company on our property for any future shipments. In the future, if you’re getting harassed by the truck drivers, let us know so we can put a stop to it.”

I emailed [Logistic Company] and informed them of the issue, and even though it was just an isolated issue with just that driver, I told them that we would refuse to use the transportation company he works for from here on out.

My supervisor and I heard back from [Logistic Company] about fifteen minutes later. They passed along their apology for the behavior of the driver and ensured us that they would no longer allow the use of that company for any future pickup requests at our facility.

Soon after I turned fifteen, I had a job at a local grocery store. I had worked there for a little over a year. I had three friends that worked there, along with twelve other students from the local high school. The fifteen of us made up a majority of the floor, register, and bagging staff.

Payday came every other Friday, and that’s how it had been for the fourteen-plus months I had worked there. The upcoming Friday was payday, and as a teenager, making about $300 every other week was awesome. It paid for my car insurance, gas money, and whatever else I had to put my money toward.

Friday came along and paychecks were handed out. I opened my check and it was short over $100. I flipped the check over and looked at the check stub and saw a $100-something deduction for Union Dues.

My friend approached me, and he had the same deduction on his check, along with all the other teenagers that worked there.

Union? This place is part of a union? None of us were ever told it was part of a union and they had union dues. Out of the fourteen-plus months I had been working there, there were never, not once, any other Union Dues deducted from my paycheck. This was news to me.

We asked the store manager about it, and he said it was mandatory for deduction for dues to be taken from payments for the past couple of months that were missed, and that dues would be taken out of future paychecks. After that, he just kind of brushed us off.

That was the last straw for me. I was tired of the store manager always working the high school students for fifteen minutes shy of full shifts so he didn’t have to give us breaks.

He was always looking to work his staff as much as possible and give us as little in return for breaks. Now, we had union dues we need to pay into, and no one was ever informed the place was part of a union or that we had dues to pay? Screw that. I was done.

I told my friends that I was looking for a new job, and once I found one, I was putting my two weeks. They agreed and spread the word among all the high schoolers working at the grocery store that we’d do a mass exiting.

About a week later, I told them I’d found a new job and would start it in two weeks. I wanted to start it on the spot, but my mom told me to do the decent thing and put in my two-week notice. So, I told my friends at work that I was putting in my two-week notice the next day, and they told all the other high schoolers.

I got to work the next day and I found out that I was the ninth person to put in their two-week notice that day. By the end of the day, out of the fifteen high schoolers working there, thirteen of us had put in our two-week notice.

The store manager was panicking. He pulled me to the side and asked why we were all leaving at once. He said he could change the hours I worked and he’d work with us to keep us on staff. I had to explain to him that the surprise union dues were the last straw. The union was worthless to part-time teenagers, and having to pay dues for something we wouldn’t get anything in return from was stupid. I also told him the shifts he scheduled for the teenagers are appalling, especially the five-hour-and-forty-five-minute shifts where we only got one fifteen-minute break in nearly sixteen hours of working on our feet.

Two weeks came and went, and the grocery store found no one new to replace us. Rumor was that the news had spread throughout the high school about things the management did and how they snuck union dues into our paychecks without telling us, so no high schooler wanted to work there. It took some months, but the grocery store did fill some of the positions, but it wasn’t with any high school students.

I went to work at a large pharmacy chain just across the road, made an extra dollar an hour, had better hours, and worked with some really cool managers that always had our backs. Also, there were no union dues; that was an added bonus.